My view there is that left wing 'vanguards' should be functioning in a fashion organically connected to the wider labour movement, rather than as caucuses for trade union office-holders and as bulwarks of the odd single-issue campaign.

Like Iowa, the residents of the Granite State take their role as vanguards of the process quite seriously and in turn, the Republican Candidates are heading north, and lining up to shake hands across the state.

These vanguards, in the 1960s and 1970s, used to kidnap foreign diplomats for ransom and shoot foreign - some American - torture experts training the dictatorship's death squads (hello Gen. David Petraeus; does that ring a bell?)